by Stephen Clissold

As translator

As Contributor

Stephen Clissold

Stephen Clissold (1913-1982), He received his MA from Oriel College, Oxford. During World War II, he worked as an intelligence officer in Cairo and Bari for the British Army. In 1976, he was appointed to the Order of the British Empire. He passed away in 1982.

The humble but heroic figure of St. Francis (1182-1226), who gave up wealth and security to espouse a life of poverty, an apostolic existence as much like Christ’s as possible, attracted a strong and immediate following. In a series of vivid vignettes, The Wisdom of St. Francis and His Companions portrays the lives of the original members of the Franciscan community––the childlike innocence of their faith, their brave self-denial and acute sayings, and the sometimes comic effects of their simplicity.…

The great flowering of Catholic mysticism in sixteenth-century Spain has had a lasting effect on that country’s religious life. Stephen Clissold’s The Wisdom of the Spanish Mystics provides a selection of maxims and excerpts from the writings of over twenty visionaries. Represented here are such well-known figures as the poet and theologian St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Avila, a woman of great charm and practical ability as well as acute spiritual insight, and St.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”